BookBrowse Reviews Fly Trap by Frances Hardinge

BookBrowse:

More adventures with Mosca Mye and her friends in the sequel to Fly by Night, ages 11-13

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While reading Fly Trap (also known as Twilight Robbery in the UK), the sequel to Fly By Night, I was struck by how fantasy, in all its many forms and for any given age group, just might be the most fun one can have as a reader. Who can ever forget their first reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Children of the Amulet? Portals to other worlds, strange creatures, and odd twists of time are such lovely flights of imagination in which not everything has to make sense. There is always the delicious thrill of evil lurking, and always a hero or heroine equal to overcoming that evil.

So while Fly Trap is intended for readers age 11-13, I recommend it to any reader who is still willing to be transported into another world. Mosca Mye is a fabulous heroine, equal to Harry Potter or Philip Pullman's Lyra Belacqua, and yet is uniquely herself. "Drips fell from the tip of a pointed nose. Beneath a drooping bonnet with a frayed brim, hair spiked and straggled like a tempest-tossed blackbird's nest. An olive green dress two sizes too big was hitched at the waist and daubed knee-high in thick yellow mud. And behind the clinging strands of damp hair, two large black eyes glistened like coal and gave the marketplace a look that spoke of coal's grit, griminess, and hidden fire." That is Mosca - orphan, scrapper, nearly always hungry and cold, careening through life righting wrongs and dreaming of warmth, food and a soft bed.

Her animal companion is an equally hungry goose, Saracen, who also acts as a bodyguard. Her human companion and partner in crime is the poet and grifter Eponymous Clent, a man with a quick wit and a horror of a day's work, who is usually talking his way out of the latest disaster he created. The three arrive in Toll, hoping to make their way to warmer, more prosperous lands for the winter. Naturally Toll is not what it seems, and they are instantly entangled in both their own deep troubles as well as the twisted circumstances of the town. It is the role of Eponymous to come up with plans, which Mosca carries out despite any amount of hardship and danger.

Toll is a town that serves as the sole gateway from one area to another; it is as two-sided as a coin, with daytime and nighttime set simultaneously in the same streets, markets and alleys, though never can the two meet or interact. In this world, a person's place and name is determined by his or her hour of birth. Every hour has a patron saint, a little god called a Beloved. And Mosca's Beloved is Palpitattle (He Who Keeps Flies Out of Jams and Butter Churns), which explains Mosca's name, meaning housefly. In this town, all are subject to their names and Beloveds, except the Locksmiths who play day against night in an effort to control everything.

In a story of non-stop action and incident, Frances Hardinge magically manages to fill in the back-story of Fly By Night and explain the religion of Beloveds, the politics of Toll, and the dastardly goals of the evil Locksmiths. Her description of how Toll-by-Day becomes Toll-by-Night rivals the writing of Neil Gaiman and China Mieville. Possibly because I am an adult, I got weary reading what started to seem an endless tale and thought Hardinge could have left off about 100 pages without harm. However, I remember being of a reading age where the longer the book the better, so I doubt that younger readers would have the same problem.

No matter your age, Fly Trap is highly recommended to those who like the fantasy genre. It would make a great read for a middle-school book group as well.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2011, and has been updated for the October 2012 edition. Click here to go to this issue.